


Sometimes

by GibbousLunation



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, The Fade, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 02:15:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4417160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GibbousLunation/pseuds/GibbousLunation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story was done, the heroes returned and the beast defeated, and he was left to wait. Alistair contemplates lost love and lost time, drifting in the fade with a memory of a smile.<br/>It was time for him to be the hero, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes

**Author's Note:**

> Just a terribly tragic little thing I wrote to shake off a bit of writers block. This sadistic one shot here is dedicated to the lovely Teekayeh, because you asked and because I apparently enjoy making my friends cry about fictional characters. Sorry not sorry?
> 
> Spoilers for Inquisition, and obviously Origins!
> 
> (For even more tragedy, listen to http://8tracks.com/jomkork/and-time-will-give-us-nothing while reading!)

Sometimes, he swore he could still feel the warmth of her hand on his cheek. Sometimes even a voice accompanied it, whispering softly about the sunrise, about thirty odd years of comfortable companionship and retired boots and time cut too short. It told him tales about firelight campfires and a rose that bloomed brighter in darkness than sunlight, about outstretched hands and duties and ties to things too great for either of them. Sometimes it felt like morning, like rolling over and stretching out and feeling everything all at once when someone was there next beside him.

 

Sometimes, in weaker moments, he could even see her eyes. 

 

He passed time, or through time he wasn’t too sure anymore, with visions of different lives; ones adorned with jewels and wrinkled eyes like folded pages, and others with easy, tired smiles and a hand holding his tightly over tea cups and under covers. Often, he couldn’t differentiate where he began and the other him ended, stretching out with a trembling arm before catching himself, or his fatigue catching him, and pulling away. It all seemed so intertwined, like a drop of dew on a spider web, or a ball of yarn twisted and packed together. Maybe the problem was in how badly he wanted it to be real.

 

If this haze was to be his desire, his demon affliction, pulling apart his mind one morning kiss at a time, he supposed it wasn’t all terrible. It was dangerous, however, how he existed simply in the moments where her voice followed him. It was dangerous how much he wanted her to be near him.

 

Maybe that was how they got under their victims skin, singing gentle hymns into the very core of you until nothing hateful remained. Or maybe he’d done enough in his time, served Thedas well and loved deeply and the Maker had rewarded him with one last visit before he blinked out of existence. It would be a perfect irony that as Andraste’s Herald left him behind the Maker picked him back up, after so many years of his hateful spite towards them both. Divine forgiveness, truly was a mysterious thing.

 

That is, if the overwhelming agony pulling at him in his lucid moments meant he still lived, rather than some sadistic limbo between pain and pleasure. It certainly felt like some kind of punishment. Thrown away like so much garbage, left to wilt and rot alone with his thoughts. She believed that the Grey Wardens could rebuild, that they deserved more than the short stick they’d been given, she’d fought back against everything that told her no. “Afterwards,” she’d say, “We can be together. Forever, this time.” They deserved a break, she’d deserved a monument. 

 

Except their lives hadn’t played out like the story books, she’d gone and made the ultimate sacrifice and saved thousands of lives and families and he’d been left wandering alone, clinging to duty and order, until duty and order found him. His fate was twisted and wrought with a sense of wrong, of half-life, until it unceremoniously dropped him in the Fade with a sword and a fragile sense of self-worth and a monster he never had any hope of taking down. 

 

Yet he had taken it down, miraculously. Like divine providence, like destiny. A long drawn out battle, everything in him in the drive of his sword and the heft of his shield, until he’d been granted victory. Not that it had been content to be defeated without claiming a prize for itself.

 

Ungrateful spider bastard.

 

Alistair would be lying if he wasn’t angry at her, though, for leaving him in shambles all these years. Warden Amell, Hero of Ferelden, breaker of hearts. Sure, it had been noble and selfless and more golden hearted than anyone could possibly ever be, but it didn’t make the bits of glass inside his heart hurt any less. He’d been so angry, for years. At the world, at the Blight, at her. He’d drunken himself into a stupor, cut ties with all of his companions despite their sympathetic, watering eyes, and abandoned everything. Seeing her like this, happy and whispering about love and old age, it cut him down to the core in more ways than one.

 

So, torture he supposed. 

 

The Maker was vengeful perhaps, taunting him with his fragile and broken hopes, stringing them along just in front of him where he could almost reach but never quite hold. And yet, whether it was his waning strength or the understanding that near death brought, or maybe the demons song pulling away at his resolve, his anger felt more like relief.

 

He wanted to be stronger than this, wanted to pull himself together by his threads and strings and stand tall like the proud Warden he always believed he could be. He wanted to push this sickness away, this sugared falsehoods that weighed in his veins like lead and lyrium. She wasn’t really here, he’d think, she’d left him, pushed him out to sea in a boat that would never float. And yet, the madness overtook him easily, like sleep, like he needed this vision of Amell more than anything else.

 

He remembered his last moments, vaguely. Sifting through the misted green of his life was chaotic, hard to focus on one moment entirely when so many fought for attention. 

 

Sometimes, he nearly forgot who he was, who he’d been.

 

There’d been a choice, someone needed to stay behind, the classic tale. Except, this time they’d listened and given him his moment of duty, of heroism. He’d wanted to laugh at their pained faces as he held his ground, as if his life was worth more than theirs; the cracking of his dried lips faintly at the thought did pull a gasping hiss from his lungs. He held no bitterness towards either of them, he was almost grateful, even. Finally, no more duty, no more soldiering on. They both held the power to change everything, both heroes with legends sweeping after their steps. Alistair was a broken man parading as a commander, he’d never been anything more, not until now.

 

She’d scold him for being so self-depreciating, but, honestly. It was his chance to take a walk in the halls of glory, the Hero of Adamant, or something dramatic of the sort. She’d taken the fancier title from him, years ago, and he was nothing if not competitive by nature. 

 

Going out in the blaze of battle, to save the Herald of Andraste herself along with the Champion of Kirkwall? Take that, Amell. 

 

There were worse ways to go he supposed, and worse ways to live. He had a memory of a smile, and a trace of redemption and he’d followed it back to her somehow. It ached in ways he’d never known possible, the pain outweighed the skip of his heart beat, both physically and somewhere deep in his soul. Their lives had been stolen, whisked away as if they meant nothing, as if he’d meant nothing. 

 

He wanted to hate her for breaking him apart, for destroying the small tidbit of happiness he’d managed to hold onto during the chaos of losing Duncan and all of his makeshift family. His life was resigned to being shortened the minute he’d taken the goblet of taint years ago, but to be left here, waiting in the Fade for death that wouldn’t quite guide his failing light. It was a cruelty he couldn’t have wished on anyone, and yet, he felt himself smiling. 

 

He would wait here, with a memory of a dream until everything else left. It would be enough, she was always enough.

 

Sometimes the green melted away into golden sunlight and everything felt so right he would have cried if he could remember what it meant, and sometimes she looked at him with such sorrow and regret, and told him that she’d see him in the morning, that he was so strong and she was so proud. He could never speak, never tell her he was fine and it didn’t even hurt anymore, but she’d flit away and so would he until the song began again.

Sometimes she told him she loved him, and sometimes he held onto a wisp of a dream until sanity cracked and caked its way back into his being, and he would pray for one more morning.


End file.
